F1 News: Toto Wolff Responds To Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes Strategy Concerns

Saajan Jogia | Jul 30, 2024

Toto Wolff 2023 Singapore Grand Prix, Friday - LAT Images / Mercedes Press Image

While Lewis Hamilton questioned Mercedes for not informing him about teammate George Russell's one-stop strategy during the Belgian GP, team principal Toto Wolff defended the decision, asserting that pitting Hamilton twice was the 'right thing to do'.

Although George Russell crossed the finish line first, followed by Hamilton, his victory was short-lived. Shortly after the race, the 26-year-old was disqualified when the FIA determined that his W15 F1 car was underweight by 1.5 kilograms.

Consequently, Hamilton inherited the top position and secured full points for the win. Mercedes attributes the weight loss during the race to excessive tire wear. Nonetheless, the team has initiated a thorough investigation to identify the underlying cause and prevent future occurrences.

The seven-time world champion revealed to Viaplay that he was called in for a second pit stop despite informing his team that the tires were holding up well. Hamilton questioned Mercedes' lack of communication, expressing frustration over not being informed about his teammate's one-stop strategy. He said:

“You have to put your faith in the people that you work with so I put my faith in my strategist. I should be able to lean on him fully.

“I told him that the tires were fine and they called me in.

“Did I know that I was at risk of getting one-stopped by my team-mate? They didn’t tell me that.”

Hamilton, who moves to Ferrari next season, felt let down by his strategists for not giving him the complete picture. Wolff, however, argued that Russell's one-stop call was made on the spot after the driver asked the team to consider it. He told the media:

“As a driver you don’t have the full picture because he said his tyres are good but at that stage, nobody had a one-stop on the radar. We had to cover the cars behind.

“So we had to cover and you can see that everybody else went on the two-stop. Logically it [a one-stop] just wasn’t on the wasn’t on the radar.

“What we did with Lewis was absolutely the right thing to do.

“But at the end, George made them survive which couldn’t have been anticipated because if it would have been any of the other top teams would have done it.”

Wolff added that while drivers gave their inputs about the tires, the team's decision was also backed by machines and mathematicians who provided data to make the right call. He said:

“I think we can pick out singular events where the driver had the right idea in the race.

"But there’s so many machines running in the background, calculating tire degradations and pace of the others, plus a bunch of really clever mathematicians and strategies that look at that.

“So in my opinion, nine out of 10 times it’s the data that gives you the direction and we are a sport needs to rely on the data.

“But driver input is always important and what we encourage is great communication between the driver and the engineers that’s going to give better data to the strategists and today it correlated because at a certain stage we said here’s nothing more to lose here and George said ‘can we make it a one-stop’ so then we knew.”